Queer left politics, pop culture and skepticism

About the author

Alex Gabriel is the author of Godlessness in Theory, a blog about religion and how to leave it, popular rhetoric and political dissent, secular, nerd and LGBT cultures, sexuality and gender or whatever else comes to mind. mralexgabriel@me.com; @AlexGabriel.

You’re welcome, Pat. And it isn’t slander, is it, if you think your image benefits? (It isn’t anyway, of course. Slander, to offer one of Spider-Man‘s underused lines, is spoken. In print, it’s libel – and how he thinks a court could rule on whether or not his views are racist, I don’t know. Like the English Defence League mind you, on whom he bundles fulsome praise, people with dark skin sometimes like him, which settles it of course.)

Objections to Freethought‘s place in our masthead are among the laziest, glibbest soundbites our critics have, but more than that display a failure to grasp even the term’s most basic history. Freethought is not ‘free thought’ or uninhibited inquiry – to think so boasts the same green literalism as thinking a Friends’ Meeting House is a shared beach hut or that Scotch pancakes contain Scotch – though even if it were, it’s silly and inane to assume one’s critics are automatons or say loose collective viewpoints mean dictatorship. Freethought is a specified tradition, European in the main, whose constituents have by and large been countercultural, radical and leftist, everything Condell and cohorts viscerally despise.

The Deutscher Freidenker-Verband, probably Europe’s major freethought organisation, claimed a membership of hundreds of thousands by the time of its proscription at the Nazis’ hands. A bulk of its support came from the Communist and Social Democratic parties, the former producing its final chair (prior to post-war revival) Max Sievers, the latter cofounded by the Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht as was the DFV. The Kommunistische Partei was itself founded by Liebknecht’s middle son Karl and Rosa Luxemburg, together Weimar Germany’s most posthumously celebrated dissidents. Christopher Hitchens appraised Luxemburg as the ‘most brilliant’ of Marxist anti-Leninists, crediting the Social Democrats with prompting Bertrand Russell’s writing career beyond building an alternative and markedly more feminist society for its supporters, the historian Isaac Deutscher (another Jewish atheist, his politics very much like hers) as closer to Marx than anyone who followed, perhaps excepting Leon Trotsky.

Marx himself remains a sharper critic of religion than Condell could ever hope to be, as were a noted swathe of (free)thinkers informed by him before and beyond Sovietism. Millions of working Germans mobilised against 1920s church politics, leaving religious organisations after campaigns by left freethinker groups, including beside the DFV the Bund Sozialistischer Freidenker with its 20,000 members, the national Zentral-Verband der Proletarischen Freidenker and the International of Proletarian Freethinkers formed with siblings around the continent. (Such working class atheist constituencies have yet to form in the present movement. I eagerly await them.) In Italy, Antonio Gramsci – recognised now among the major atheist philosophers of interest – continued the socialist-atheist tradition there of Carlo Cafiero, the minutiae of whose anarcho-communism differed from Gramsci’s politics but who associated with Britain’s National Secular Society in its founding years.

Cafiero and Errico Malatesta, Italian anarchism’s prime progenitors, both had freethinking backgrounds and were devotees of Mikhail Bakunin, likewise an ardent atheist and anarchocollectivist whose theory treated faith much as Marx did (it was, no doubt, one of the few discursive areas where they’d have jovially agreed). His views reverberated similarly in the U.S. as praised by Emma Goldman, viewed now as a founder of American anarchism, communism, feminism and atheism. On the latter subject, as in my view on all others, she is infinitely quotable.

Freethought in Britain began even before all this, and there too it was led by anarchists – among them William Godwin, philosopher and radical. His daughter Mary, also an atheist, wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and married Percy Shelley, sent down from Oxford on publishing an atheist pamphlet, himself the author of Prometheus Unbound and a political dissident. Godwin’s own wife, philosopher Mary Wollstonecroft is remembered as founding modern feminism, translated according to Azar Nafisi (quoted at Pharyngula) by modern day Iranian women opposing Sharia – Iran, whose Worker-Communists are its major secularist faction, few more prominent among them than Mansoor Hekmat, influential among other spheres on Freethought Blogs writer Maryam Namazie. Wollstonecroft’s religious views’ details are disputed, but she was by no means a fervent believer, and her politics remain distinctly anticlerical.